It’s not very often we get to hear a brand new piece of holiday music, but today I bring you this mesmerizing new work for handbells, men’s choir, and piano or orchestra. Knowing the Houston Chamber Ringers usual antics, when I saw the title I totally expected to see some holiday parody based on the song “What Does The Fox Say?“. This beautiful piece is definitely not that.
Stevie Berryman, the group’s artistic director, told me the story of this piece:
“When I was at [the Handbell Musicians of American National Seminar] in Rochester, I took a few days afterwards to visit my brother in Saratoga Springs, NY. He took me to an old bank that had been converted years ago to a Hogwarts-like used bookstore that seemed to have miles of tunnels lined on both sides with bookshelves. We happily spent an hour there looking at treasures, and I was quite proud of myself for NOT picking anything up and buying it, because i did not need one more thing to carry back with me on the train. But while I was waiting for him to finish browsing, I saw this beautiful old flower-fabric covered book, very slim, with gold edged pages. I picked it up and flipped through it to discover a book of charming nature poems that looked to be early 20th c (no date). They were delightful, but not enough to spend way more than I normally would pay for a basket full of used books…
I turned one more page, and there was a poem, ‘What Do the Bells Say?’ And it read like a Christmas carol that had never been set to music. So I bought it. I had to. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I just knew the world needed more carols about bells than ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’.
Skip forward a year or so. I had been talking with Sean Baugh, director of world-renowned Turtle Creek Chorale in Dallas for a while about the possibility of joint concerts with our group. It is logistically…problematic…to take a bell choir 4.5 hours away for 4 days in the middle of December to play 5 concerts. So it took about 2 years to make it happen. The good part of that is that we had lot of time to talk about music selections. Sean talked about commissioning a new piece for choir and bells specifically for this concert series, and I remembered the poem. So I sent him the text, and pictures of everything I could find out about the book itself (very little information was available). Sean located a composer to set it to music and orchestrate it. I took the piano score and arranged it for bells. And the first time either of our groups got to hear the rest of the piece was a couple of hours before our first performance in Dallas. I LOVE the piece. I think it’s spectacular, and I think James [Deignan] did a brilliant job capturing the text with the music.”
I could not agree with Stevie more. Every time I hear this piece I fall in love with it more. The piece is available for purchase, so you too can program it on your next holiday concert! Here is a recording of the full orchestration.
“What do the Bells say?” by E. Nesbit
What do the bells say? Listen! Listen!
They shake the trees where the ice-gems glisten.
they call and they call across the snow,
But what they are saying I do not know.
What do the bells say? Hearken! Hearken!
Up in the belfry the shadows darken.
Out of the shadows come angel wings,
And Angels teach the bell what it sings.
What do the bells say? Hear them, hear them.
They sing the song of the angels near them,
Over the snow-fields hear the chimes
The song of the first first Christmas time.
Bravely the bells go ringing, ringing.
They set the heart of the whole world singing, —
Singing the sweet old song again:
Peace on the earth – good-will to men.”
